Power-law growth
From InterSciWiki
There seem to be solid mechanisms to explain why human population has spurts of power-law growth. What about biological phenomena? A parallel is made in
Phanerozoic marine biodiversity follows a hyperbolic trend Alexander V. Markov, Andrey V. Korotayev, 2007, Palaeoworld 16 (2007) 311–318. online at www.sciencedirect.com
So I asked my friend Doug Erwin about this. Conclusion: sent to Andrey - You could look at this result as positive feedback processes between species
but the analogy is not directly with population growth, but neither is that so for human population growth
where there are positive feedback processes between migration to cities and natural population growth in rural areas.
Original Message-----
From: Doug White [1] Sent: Sun 11/11/2007 3:53 PM To: Erwin, Doug Subject: what do you make of this kind of finding?
Given that processes in human population growth and biodiversity are so different, is their any substance to this comparative justification?
what would be some power-law growth mechanisms in biology?
Doug
Reply-----
Hi Doug
You found that pretty fast! Ricard Sole and I have actully played around with hyperbolic models for diversity as well, albeit on a different time scale. I don't see that there is anything more wrong with this model, intrinsically, than there is in applying logistic or exponential growth models to biodiversity. All of them suffer from the same fallacy of assuming that global biodiveristy is in someway analgous to population growth, and that this is true over tens to hundreds of millions of years (I am actually working on a manuscript on this). The hyperbolic model does have the advantage of recognizing that positive feedback processes do occur between species, so I suppose that is something to recommend it
I hope you are well
Doug
